When programming Python I sometimes do a ** to make a conversion. I understand what it does but what data structures am I manipulating? A dict and what is the other? An array? Is there a name for the ** operator?

There are two meanings for **. Power and "keyword argument dictionary". Which are you talking about? The documentation has these words: " If the form “**identifier” is present, it is initialized to a new dictionary receiving any excess keyword arguments, defaulting to a new empty dictionary." Which of them seem relevant to your question?
–
S.LottJan 23 '12 at 18:03

"keyword argument dictionary" was the one I'm asking about. Thank you for the comments.
–
Niklas in StockholmJan 24 '12 at 5:38

The *args argument is called the "variable positional parameter" and **kwargs is the "variable keyword parameter".
Keyword-only arguments can't be given positionally, because a variable positional parameter will take all of the arguments you pass.

Most of this can be found in PEPs 0362 and 3102, as well as in the Control Flow section of the docs. It should be noted though that the function signature object PEP is only a draft, and the terminology might just be one person's idea. But they are good terms anyway. :)

So the * and ** arguments just unpack their respective data structures:

*: Iterables are objects that implement the __iter__() method and mappings are objects that implement __iter__() and __getitem__(). Any object that supports this protocol will be understood by the constructors tuple() and dict(), so they can be used for unpacking arguments.

I don't think it has a name. In the Python Docs under "Unpacking Argument Lists", it's just referred to as "the **-operator."

I'm not sure what you mean by "the other" data structure. When you do f(**kwargs) you unpack the dictionary kwargs as a sequence of key-value pairs. I don't see that there's another structure involved.

If you are unsure what to call a particular operator or if it is unnamed, you can always resort to Waka Waka Bang Splat as a reference to help you figure out what to call it. In this case for ** I would call it double-splat, though there are some alternate names for symbols.